Dike Blair

Dike Blair (b. 1952, New Castle, Pennsylvania) uses gouache, oil, his own photographs, and strategies appropriated from Postminimalist sculpture to create intimate tableaux that transform quotidian sights and materials into exercises in formalism. A writer and teacher as well as an artist, Blair came up in the downtown scene of 1970s New York among punk rockers and Postmodernists. In the early 1980s, against prevailing art world trends toward Neo-Expressionism, he began rendering scenes from his life in gouache on paper. These ongoing diaristic paintings are devoid of human figures but nonetheless evoke the specter of the artist whose daily life plays out at a remove across their finely-wrought surfaces. Blair lives in New York and Sullivan County.

Jonathan T. D. Neil was Editor of the Held Essays on Visual Art for the Brooklyn Rail from 2011-15. Currently he is Co-Founder of Inversion Art, a startup that provides investment, strategy and management services to visual artists.